Malaria, Devouring Mother
2023
Sound commission for TJ Shin’s audio-textual work
Electronics, digital instruments, and manipulated found sound and field recordings by Shin
Active Cultures, Los Angeles
Listening party: KX Lab, February 4, 2023
Malaria, Devouring Mother is an audio-textual work, part of TJ Shin’s larger Active Cultures commission. Shin’s lecture series began in March 2022 with Food Material. Malaria, Devouring Mother furthers Shin’s explorations of histories of disease, the politics of contamination, and the contestation of ‘Euro-American ecological imagination through constructed and disruptive micro-ecologies’.
Mackenzie composed the soundscape, combining electronics and digital instruments with the manipulation and sculpting of Shin’s found sound and field recordings. Drawing on a shared interest in speculative ecologies, manipulated field recording and noise, the work invites listening to a garden that “is the life of muddied waters, the shrapnel of drones, the hum of something not quite like you, and losing yourself to what can’t be helped. The garden is an invitation to fall into someone else’s rhythm — to listen between the lines of devotion, dispossession, and deviation. Without metaphor, the map, the garden — where does one lie?” (Anna Cho-Son).
From Active Cultures:
“Malaria, Devouring Mother is an audio guide to murky ecologies near and far: from a biology lab in Buffalo to the artist’s studio in Los Angeles; from the pressure of hydraulic oil fracking to the puncture of a gene gun. The soundscape draws out the parasitic noise of extractive capitalism and the entwined politics of infection between body and geography, and it builds upon Shin’s long-term explorations of the historical life of malaria as well as the politics of contamination. Reflecting on the internal rhythm of the parasite, which causes and manifests the cyclical nature of malaria, Shin presents a sonar oscillation between the contamination of pulse, human and non-human bodies, and the rippling legacies of colonialism.”
The work was later transformed into a multichannel sound installation for Shin’s solo exhibition The Vegetarian: the Swamp, the Swarm & the Cross at BICA, Buffalo.
Listen: Malaria, Devouring Mother (Active Cultures) ↗
Composition, processing and sound design: Michelle Helene Mackenzie (electronics, digital instruments). Found samples and field recordings: TJ Shin. Mastering: Joshua Stevenson. Commissioned by TJ Shin for Active Cultures.